The Ethics of Servcie-Learning

In pairs, I would like you to write a letter to the editor of The Clarion in which you argue for or against mandatory service-learning at DU. That is, do you think undergraduate students should be required to take at least one service-learning course while they are at DU? Why or why not? If so, what kind of service-learning courses makes sense for students? What kind of civic engagement is good for students, for the university, or for communities off campus? If not, what makes service-learning (mandatory or not) problematic? How might it diminish students’ education experience or prove challenging in ways that fail to promote the public good?

As you craft this letter, keep in mind the rhetorical appeals you learned about in WRIT 1122/1622 last quarter. How can you base part of your argument on your own expertise or authority on this issue? In what ways can you connect with your readers and gain their trust? What emotional appeals might strengthen your position? What commonplace values could you ground your argument in? What outside evidence or testimony could you include to bolster your claim (even doing a cursory search via google)?

Field Notes: Second Interview

After your second interview, post your observations from your experience here as a comment. Continue to record as many details as you can remember from your visit to The Gathering Place. (That is, describe how you felt coming in for your second shift, who you worked with and talked to, how the interviews unfolded, what you noticed or thought was significant.) You might also pay attention to any differences you noted (either in yourself or others) during this visit, or reflect on what you think you're learning from these interviews.

Field Notes: First Interview

After you conduct your first interview, I'd like you to reflect on your experience. In as much detail as you can remember, tell the rest of us what you observed on your first visit to The Gathering Place. Tell us about your first impression of the space, the people you met, how your interviews went, who else you talked to, and how you felt about your visit to The Gathering Place. Be as detailed and descriptive as you can, as you will use these notes later in the quarter for your participant-observer study.

Mother's Day Tea Plans

Once your group has come up with a plan for your tasks for the Mother's Day Tea, please give the rest of us an update on what you're planning to do. Thanks!

Reflecting on Your First Two Writing Assignments

Take a few minutes and reflect on your first two writing assignments for this class. As a writer, how did you approach compiling your annotated bibliography? What did your writing process look like for this project? What did you learn about research from doing it?

Next, contrast this experience to that of writing your research memo. What did you do differently as a writer to create this document? How did your writing change? How did you figure out what to include in this memo and what to leave out? What do you think you’ll take away from this assignment as a writer?

Reflecting on Our Progress Thus Far, Preparing for Our Next Project

Now that we’ve finished the main part of Elliot Liebow’s study and been visited by two staff members from The Gathering Place, I’d like you to reflect on the connections you see emerging between this study and this organization. In the final chapter of Tell Them Who I Am, Liebow writes,

Homeless people are homeless because they do not have a place to live.

Given all of our reading and discussion (and your research, too), what do you think about this assertion? How does it relate to the perspectives that Justine and Lisa brought to our class on Monday? What do you think is the most significant thing you’ve learned about homelessness, poverty, gender or research from them or from our course thus far that will prepare you for our work with The Gathering Place?

The Value of Relationships

In our reading for today, Elliot Liebow focuses on the kinds of relationships that the women of his study cultivate when they are homeless and reflects on the impact of these relationships on their lives, their well-being, and their ability to survive in the shelters and on the street. Take a few minutes and reflect on this chapter. Identify one of the conclusions Liebow comes to about these relationships and integrate a quotation into your comment from him that illustrates this point. How do Liebow’s observations support this conclusion? Why is it significant?

Presenting Research to Different Audiences

To start today’s class, I’d like you to think about the differences between the scholarly audience you are writing to for our first assignment and the research memo to The Gathering Place that you’ll eventually be writing. First, given the reading you’ve done thus far for your annotated bibliographies, I’d like you to characterize what about this research appeals to scholarly readers. That is, how do these studies establish their credibility within their academic fields? How are the findings presented so as to meet the expectations of other academics who study this issue?

Second, if you had to translate your research and present it to an audience of DU students who are preparing to volunteer for Project Homeless Connect or the young people who speak in the video from Denver’s Road Home, what information from these articles would be important and appropriate to share with them? How would you explain the findings to them in a way that would make sense given their understanding of the issue?

Ultimately, given your response to these two prompts, how would you describe the difference between writing for scholars and for a group of your peers?